time to stop pretending i'm just here to read

Batya, also known as The Toon | born mid-1970s | she/her pronouns | Jewish Orthodox | New Yorker | filker | fanfic writer | foodie | cranky old fandom dowager countess (sort of like being a bitter old fandom queen only less so)
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  • prismatic-bell:

    iconuk01:

    fae-cryptid:

    defilerwyrm:

    Today I’m thinking about hobbits.

    For all the criticism that can be levied against Tolkien’s work and the LOTR movies based on it, there’s something that occurred to me just recently that I find strangely refreshing.

    The hobbits eat. They are a culture that revolves to a large degree around food—bountiful food, frequent food. They are not, by and large, a skinny folk, but tend to carry weight with them. Hobbits are stout.

    And the narrative does not say they’re bad for this.

    They get hungry more often than humans, and eat many more meals in a day.

    The narrative shows that this clashes with a questing life, but it does not say they’re bad for this. When Merry and Pippin moan about second breakfast, the joke isn’t “ha ha hobbits are gluttons” so much as it’s “ha ha culture shock/these yokels are out of their depth because they’ve lived a relatively very easy life, entirely unlike Strider”.

    They eat large amounts at a time. Their larders are the size of living rooms and their everyday meals are feasts.

    And the narrative does not say they’re bad for this.

    So just this once, we have an entire culture of some-degree-of-fat people who eat big and eat often and have something of a fixation on food, and while the narrative does show that these ingrained habits are the result of a life of comfort and security that they must, with difficulty and understandable complaint, leave behind when they go on their journeys beyond their own borders for entirely practical reasons, it does not judge them as lazy, fat gluttons who were Wrong About It and must become human-grade health nuts in order to be worthy of heroism, or use them as a well of fat jokes.

    Bilbo tricked a dragon while sporting a paunch.

    It’s not every day you get a story like that.

    Also, if you were a guest of a hobbit, they would make sure you had more than enough food—they would pile so much food on your plate and fuss over you if you were thin by their standards, because clearly this meant that you weren’t getting enough food, and as your host, it’s their responsibility and delight to make sure that you’re happy and cared for, and have the best rooms with the windows that have the nice views, and they’d give you the best food they have, and they would pamper you, and if you were going to be in town for a while, soon enough everyone would be inviting you over for meals or for afternoon tea or something because word got around the grapevine that you need a little extra food, and they would treat you better than family, because that’s how hobbits are. And if you were what hobbits considered a healthy weight, they would still do all of the above! Only a little differently, because of different reasons, because they’re a community and hobbit manners are Important, and if you’ve been accepted in the community, then they’re building you a social calendar because they’re very sociable and know that you might not know everyone yet, and everyone is just going to love you—though you will find occasional family rivalries, as they are prone to happen, and they will mostly manifest in bake-offs and Who Can Host The Best Party

    If you want to insult a Hobbit, you don’t insult their family, you insult their hospitality (and if you’re really wanting to commit social suicide, criticising their larder is guaranteed to start a fight that will last generations)

    Also, consider the pride a Hobbit would take in showing a visitor their garden. Not just the lawns, which will be practically sized and tended to within an inch of their lives, but the vegetable plots where their carrots and onions and taters grow and, if they have the resources, the cold frames and greenhouses and where they grow the fancier things to augment their meals, their own specialities.

    The Baggin’s might be seen as a little grand and eccentric because they HIRED a gardener rather than doing it all themselves like most Hobbits, but they hired a Gamgee to do it, and they listen to his recommendations, which show’s they’re grand, but not stupid, so that’s all right.

    All of this, but also:


    One of the ways the narrative shows Gollum is not the same as Sméagol is that while he was once either a hobbit or something like one, he is now painfully skinny. Even when he leaves Moria and becomes able to scavenge in the outside world, he never puts on a single ounce.

    Gollum is skinny and doesn’t like good food. He’s been living on raw unseasoned fish and small animals for so long that the very concept of cooked meat and herbs and vegetables is upsetting to him, and the taste of lembas makes him choke. He says of himself: “He doesn’t eat grasses or roots, no precious, not till he’s starving or very sick, poor Sméagol.”

    This isn’t an indication that he’s evil, either; it’s a symptom of how badly he’s been damaged by the time he spent carrying the Ring. Both Frodo and Sam, each in his own way, express some hope that Gollum might someday get better – and that enjoying some good food might either help him, or be a sign that he’s improved.

    Hobbits are fat and love to eat and the narrative supports them in both, and I think that’s beautiful.

    • 2 weeks ago
    • 5248 notes
    • #tolkien
    • #LOTR
    • #hobbitses
    • #food
    • #hell yeah
    • #deep srs literary analysis
  • corantus:

    image

    swordtember #2 - candle

    havdalah sword? havdalah sword….

    HAVDALAH SWORD

    (via oz-lamo-yiten)

    • 3 weeks ago
    • 754 notes
    • #fantasy art
    • #weird jewish things
    • #i tell you what wow
    • #pretty shiny pointy sharp
  • Hi Toon! I hope you've been well <3 🌟 for forgive us the days forgotten to fear or Letters?

    blorbologist

    (from here!)

    Hello! I’m good, thanks. <3

    Oh man, tough choice. I think I gotta go with Letters because forgive us the days forgotten to fear is just so, so long.

    Letters is the second of two short fics I wrote with a stealth Jewish headcanon for Caleb Widogast. I say ‘stealth’ because nothing is explicitly named as Jewish, and I did it that way for two reasons. Firstly to sidestep around the question of how any real-world ethnoreligion could exist in the secondary world of Exandria; secondly, and more importantly, to underscore the fact that the Dwendalian Empire is currently a place where unapproved religions must be practiced in secret, deniably.

    Just about everything I put in that story involving Caleb’s upbringing with regard to the Proper Treatment of Books is based on the Jewish traditions I was raised with involving specifically holy books, such as printed copies of the Tanakh or prayer books or anything bearing God’s name. If you drop one by accident you kiss it when you pick it up; one must not stack other objects on top of them, or leave them lying open; copies too worn to read must be buried rather than discarded. Without a specific religious tradition to tie to those practices, it made sense to me to generalize them to all books, and that worked fairly well as a Blumenthal tradition of quasi-reverence to the written word itself. (I’ve also found in myself, and in others I’ve known who were raised with similar traditions, that we often do unconsciously extend some measure of that reverence to all books.)

    All that is to highlight one line in the very last section, where shortly after Caleb has first disintegrated and then burned the ancient writings on time travel in Aeor, and immediately after drawing a direct connection between the burying of books and the burying of bodies, the story says:

    “But he is a child of Blumenthal, and burning the dead will never feel any more right to him than burning the living.”

    I don’t recall whether or not I was consciously thinking of a certain Ray Bradbury quote when I wrote that, but I may as well have been.

    • 1 month ago
    • 7 notes
    • #from the ask box
    • #writing
    • #fanfic
    • #critfic
    • #critical role
    • #the mighty nein
    • #caleb widogast
    • #links
    • #this is what headcanons are for i guess
    • #weird jewish things
    • #diaspora feels
    • #i made this!
  • venoshocked-deactivated20230503:

    love the word “methinks”. like lol. yeah. me sure is thinksing.

    (via dathen)

    • 1 month ago
    • 49798 notes
    • #bwah
    • #words words words
  • Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

    dxmichelle:

    nomettesbizzareadventure:

    Reblog this if you want readers to come into your ask box and ask for the “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines. 

    Or, send in a ⭐star⭐  to have the author select a section they’ve been dying to talk about!

    Brownie points if you ask a question about that fic, section etc rather than just let me ramble!

    Please do! My fic’s all at batyatoon over on AO3.

    (via rubynye)

    • 1 month ago
    • 40973 notes
    • #fanfic
    • #writing
    • #memes
    • #links
    • #hit me!
  • ech0ech0ech0:

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    Love / being there

    Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours // @iamnotlanuk @animatedamerican @brinnanza // Alice Oseman, Heartstopper // Marieke Nijkamp, Before I Let Go // Tillie Walden, On A Sunbeam 

    oh what lovely company I find myself in!

    • 1 month ago
    • 185 notes
    • #oh tumblr
    • #i love you all
    • #relevant quotes
    • #intertextuality
  • shmreduplication:

    shmreduplication:

    when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s:

    amore ❤️

    a moray 🐍

    See Results

    A MORAY!!!!! 🐍🎊🎉🐍🐍🐍

    No no, a moray is when you swim in the sea and an eel bites your knee.

    Meanwhile, when two patterns entwine in a way serpentine, that’s a moiré.

    (via tanoraqui)

    • 1 month ago
    • 471 notes
    • #puns
    • #i could go on
  • PESACH IS COMING

    animatedamerican:

    And it’s time for the annual Pesach recipe roundup!

    • Pesach Food Suggestions  Not much here in the way of recipes, just things to cook that you may or may not have thought of. 
    • Pesach Recipe Posts:
      • Breads (Almond Butter Bread, Breakfast Bread, Rochel’s Cashew Bread, Cheesy Bread, Onion Bread, Savory Muffins)
      • Pastries (Banana Cake, Pie Crust, Chocolate Cake, Chocolate Chip Cookies/Blondies, Chocolate-Filled Ginger Cookies, Clementine Cake, Rosemary Hazelnut Shortbread Cookies)
      • Breakfasts (Matzah Meal Pancakes, Almond Flour Pancakes, Hot Cereal, Cold Cereal, Energy Bars)
      • Soups & Vegetable Sides (Maror & Karpas Soup, Butternut Squash & Chestnut Soup, Chilled Lemon Soup, Grain-Free Kishka, Celery-Zucchini Medley, Homestyle Hashbrowns, Toon’s Amazing Disappearing Stuffed Mushrooms)
      • NEW FOR 2018: Random Mix (Honey-‘Mustard’ Chicken, Potatoes Anna, Chestnut Soup, Leek Gratin, Mushroom Pâté, Chewy Ginger Cookies, Sugar Cookie Cups with Lemon Filling)
      • NEW FOR 2021: Random Mix 2 (Cheesy Scalloped Potatoes, Balsamic Peach Chicken, Roasted Carrot Soup, Butternut Squash Pie, Fresh Berry Tart, Scodelline (Almond Custards), and Snickerdoodle Blondies)
      • NEW FOR 2022: Random Mix 3 (Pão de Queijo (Brazilian Cheese Rolls), Roasted Artichoke-Leek Soup, Cherry Chicken with Rosemary, Chicken with Olives, Mashed Potatoes with Caramelized Zucchini Butter, Tomato Tarts, Hummingbird Cake, and Granita/Sorbet)

    Enjoy!  Go forth and make delicious foods for the holiday!

    No new Pesach recipes this year, but it’s time to reblog in case anyone’s in need of inspiration – it might be too late for changing Seder plans, but there’s still the rest of the holiday to cook for!

    • 1 month ago
    • 250 notes
    • #recipes
    • #links
    • #food
    • #pesach
    • #weird jewish things
  • mortimermcmirestinks:

    homunculus-argument:

    Random fantasy/worldbuilding thing:

    Everyone from a different culture seems strangely poetic and profoundly deep in their observations, but only because they speak whatever the common tongue is as a second language, and whatever they are saying is actually mostly just clumsily translated common sayings/figures of speech that flow much better in their own tongue, and make perfect sense to the people who understand the cultural context.

    Someone who comes from a place where geodes are common will describe another person: “He is like a stone that seems to hold a treasure inside of it - you learn to know such stones by their shape and their weight - but once you split it open, there is no quartz, no amethyst, no sparkling and brilliant crystal you expected. Just solid rock, through and through. He is like one of those rocks.” Which vaguely makes sense, but they’re clearly frustrated about not being quite able to express what they’re trying to say.

    The thing is, in their own first language, there’s a specific word for this kind of rock - one that outwardly seems to be a geode but it isn’t one after all. This word is also commonly used as an insult, to describe a person who is charismatic, convincing and outwardly seems brilliantly smart, but is actually dumb as shit.

    human, speaking dwarvish to an dwarf: “this quest you’re on, it’s like… when the rains come, and the sun shines through the water in the air, and the raindrops form a prism through which sunlight casts a shimmering illusion of rings of colour across the sky, it’s as if the ribbons of light are indicating some great treasure that you can never find, because the coloured lights are an illusion. and pursuing the lights will just lead you on and on forever.”

    dwarf: :o “that’s so beautiful…”

    …

    human, speaking humanish to a human: “his quest is like he’s looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

    other human: “ah yeah I getcha.”

    I once had a sequence in a roleplaying game in which another player’s character, who’d been missing a limb for some time, talked about the phantom pains he’d been experiencing.

    And my character, who was (a) a bard and (b) unfamiliar with the term, was so struck by the poetry of that description. “Pain’s ghost, dead but lingering.”

    Still kinda proud of that one. :)

    (via truculentbantam)

    • 1 month ago
    • 11044 notes
    • #writing
    • #worldbuilding
    • #words words words
    • #rp
    • #d&d character
    • #azimar: tiefling tragedy bard
    • #in his original incarnation
    • #(trackertag)
  • When you eat a sandwich, how do you like the fillings to be distributed?

    Uniformly and homogenously – each bite should be about the same as the last

    NOT uniformly – each bite should be a little different from the last

    Heaped in the center with a border of unfilled bread all the way around

    A specific other preference (tell me in the tags)

    It depends on what the fillings are (tell me in the tags)

    No preference whatsoever

    See Results

    I found this old post and realized hey, I could make it an actual poll now! So I did.

    • 1 month ago
    • 107 notes
    • #tumblr polls
    • #food
    • #analogies are like sandwiches
    • #but sandwiches are not like analogies
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